Red socks pay tribute to Ed Sabol's Hall of Fame call

DALLAS - In honor of the man who built the company they work for, all 140 of the NFL Films employees who worked Super Bowl XLV yesterday at Cowboys Stadium - cameramen, producers, engineers, sound men, engineers, writers, editors - wore red socks.

"That was one of my dad's sartorial idiosyncrasies," Steve Sabol said Saturday after the announcement that his father had been selected for the Pro Football Hall of Fame. "Even if he was wearing a tuxedo, he'd always wear red socks.

"So we decided, whether he got in or not, our entire group of 140 people from Films that are down here would all be wearing red socks Sunday."

Actually, Sabol had to scrounge up a 141st pair Saturday, for NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, who also wanted to pay tribute to the 94-year-old NFL Films founder.

Sabol will be inducted Aug. 6 in Canton, Ohio, along with six other men who were voted in by the Hall's 44-member board of selectors - running back Marshall Faulk, cornerback Deion Sanders, tight end Shannon Sharpe, defensive end Richard Dent and two senior committee nominees, linebackers Les Richter and Chris Hanburger.

"I'm very proud," Ed Sabol said by phone from his home in Scottsdale, Ariz. "This is quite a thing. I'm especially proud of the people that I worked with; great people who worked so hard and so well. This is for them."

Sabol is the 19th "contributor" to be selected to the Hall of Fame, but the first one who isn't an owner, commissioner or general manager.

His selection speaks volumes about the impact NFL Films, based in Mount Laurel, N.J., has had on the NFL's incredible rocket-ship-to-the-moon success.

Forty-five years ago, when the league's 12 owners agreed to chip in $20,000 apiece to buy Sabol's company, Blair Motion Pictures, the NFL wasn't the $9 billion-a-year monolith that it is today. It wasn't packing stadiums every week. And it definitely wasn't must-see TV.

As hard as it might be to believe now, it was running third behind baseball and college football in the hearts, minds and wallets of America's sports fans. Pete Rozelle, the commissioner back then, charged Sabol and his company with changing that.

He told Ed and Steve that if the NFL ever was going to flourish, it had to succeed on television. Said that's where the league's future was.

Told them that, to do that, the game needed a mystique, a larger-than-life image. Rozelle had just watched a documentary that Sabol had made for the league called "They Call It Pro Football," and was mesmerized by it.

It incorporated everything NFL Films would become famous for over the next 5 decades - the music, the ground-level shots, the ultraslow motion, microphone-wearing coaches, and a narrator who would become known as the Voice of God, John Facenda.

The league's owners weren't enthusiastic about Sabol's decision to use Facenda, an unknown anchorman from Philadelphia. They wanted to go with somebody with a higher profile, like ABC's Chris Schenkel. But Sabol refused to budge.

Rozelle gave Ed and Steve unlimited creative freedom to be the league's storytellers and mythmakers, and they used that creative freedom like Rembrandt used a brush.

The NFL was just starting to build a tradition when Sabol came along in the early 1960s. What NFL Films gave it was a mythology.

It immortalized players and coaches and turned them into larger-than-life images. It turned games into battles and wars that live on in our minds forever. The Ice Bowl. The Immaculate Reception. The Catch. The Drive. The Holy Roller. The Miracle in the Meadowlands.

With his filmmaking, Sabol helped the NFL soar past baseball and college football and become, far and away, America's most popular sports league. It can be argued that no one has had a greater impact on the success of the game over the last 50 years than Sabol.

"I remember the early days when we would take our projector around with a bed sheet [as a screen] to Mason lodges, Kiwanis clubs, Veteran of Foreign Wars, Rotary conventions," Steve Sabol said. "When I went out to Cowboys Stadium this week and saw some of our footage up on Jerry Jones' Jumbotron screen, it's just amazing."

Ed Sabol has had an impressive life. He broke the World Interscholastic Swimming record in the 100-yard freestyle in 1935. He was on Utah Beach on D-Day. He served under George Patton at the Battle of the Bulge and the Herken Forest.

He eventually went to work for his father-in-law as an overcoat salesman. There was good money in it, but he hated it. Used to say going to work every day was like going to the dentist. What he really loved to do was make movies.

"He turned his hobby into a business to celebrate the game of football," Steve Sabol said. "Now, the game, after 50 years, celebrates him. That's the script for a movie."

Ed Sabol spent much of November and December on his back fighting pneumonia, which is no small thing when you're 94. He nearly died. He's feeling better now, though.

His family got him one of those scooters to ride around in the house. "He's so hyper," his wife Audrey said Saturday after the announcement. "He keeps banging into things."

No one is more thrilled for Ed than Steve, a creative genius who worked hand-in-hand with his dad to make NFL Films into what it has become. He will be his dad's presenter in the ceremony at Canton.

"To me, it's so much of a story with my dad," he said. "As a son, he was my father, my role model, my best friend, my boss, the best man at my wedding. He's an incredible man.

"The fact that my dad was a finalist, all the e-mails and twitters he's been getting, he had to buy an iPad just to answer all the tweets and everything else. We were talking and he said to me, what a great week this has been. It's like a referendum for all the work that we've done over the last 50 years.

"You say it's indescribable and can't put it into words. But when I think of my dad, his whole life is a message to people who don't know what they want to do with their lives. Well, he didn't know what he wanted to do until he was 48 years old. His message is there are paths to be blazed and dreams to be pursued, no matter what age you are."